Thornton Wilder (83 page)

He had escaped to Europe to work on
The Emporium
, and on that omnipresent compulsion, the Lope de Vega project, planning to do some research in the playwright's archives in Spain. He was also thinking about more lectures he had recently committed himself to give. He had accepted the invitation to be the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in 1950–51. This distinguished professorship obligated him to deliver a series of at least six public lectures on American literature that would then be published by the Harvard University Press.
⁴⁵

Meanwhile
The Emporium
was still giving him trouble, and he had long since put away the drafts of
The Alcestiad.
Wilder was searching for ways to impose new order in his daily life as well as his literary life, but longtime habits were hard to break. In his usual fashion his search for innovative literary forms led him to revisit his own portfolio of work for characters and themes, as well as to reread Kafka, Goethe, and Kierkegaard. As he sought the cutting edge in form and style, he turned back to Euripides and the distant past for inspiration for characters and themes.

In his ongoing self-examination in the privacy of his journal, Wilder acknowledged his propensity for fixations, intellectual obsessions, such as his intense focus on dating Lope de Vega's plays—a preoccupation that he knew was “irrational,” and grew out of “an appetite parading itself in the guise of an intellectual discipline.” He recognized that the Lope studies obstructed not only his writing, but his “very ‘thinking.' ” He wrote, “They are like a banyan-tree in my garden which sap all shoots save their own. Already they have robbed the life of
The Emporium
of whatever energy it possessed.”
⁴⁶
He had promised Arthur Hopkins the first look at his new play, and had just received news of Hopkins's death—an event that led to the death of
The
Emporium
. Wilder would never finish the play.

 

ON SUNDAY,
March 26, 1950, less than a month before his fifty-third birthday, Wilder sat alone in a hotel room in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, and took a hard look at himself and his life, literary and personal. He did not like what he saw. In his journal he wrote an unsparing self-analysis headed “A Look-around my Situation.” He was exhausted and sick with a cold that brought on, as always, partial deafness. He was eager for isolation “as promise of the new mode of life which I must enter resolutely or abandon all hope of significant experiences or work.” He wrote at length in his journal about his frustrations: He had had his fill of “false” situations—superficial social engagements, whether in London or in New Haven; meaningless polite conversations; the prevailing assumption by strangers and some friends that he
was
the books and plays he had written, that his success as an author was his only identity, and the consequent failure to recognize him as a person who possessed any identity apart from his work.

Wilder was working hard in the fifties to break some old habits and to establish “a new mode of life” that would facilitate his creative work and make him a better person. He wrote in his journal,

 

A lover burns to share himself and to compass also the life of the beloved; but the artist-lover burns in addition to share his thought-world, his
Schauen
[view or perspective], self-evident to him, and communicable not in living-together but only in the finished works. For the artist, love then has always something of the false position; and particularly marriage which I profoundly believe in
for others
, but which I am glad not to have entered into.
⁴⁷

 

In his journal Wilder searched for reasons for the “disarray” in his “psychic life” and his writing life. Perhaps it was caused, he wrote, “by the uprooting which was the War and which has been so advanced by the even deeper immersion in the ‘false positions' I have recounted.” In his unflinching self-examination, Wilder acknowledged that “all these activities have been
flights
from seriousness
.” He confessed, “I am deep in
dilettantism
. Even my apparent preoccupation with deeply serious matter, e.g. the reading of Kierkegaard, is superficial and doubly superficial because it pretends to be searching.” Despite his angst he knew the solution to his predicament—if only he could summon the will, discipline, and energy to achieve it. “Gradually, gradually I must resume my, my own meditation on the only things that can re-awaken any writing I have to do = I must gaze directly at the boundless misery of the human situation, collective and individual.”
⁴⁸

 

IN HIS
painfully candid “Look-around,” Wilder confronted himself and his future, full of insight and resolve. But all too soon he was distracting himself again, flooding his mind that spring with “Lopeana,” with Kierkegaard, with Shakespeare and Goethe, and with Melville, Poe, Thoreau, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and other American writers who might appear in his Norton lectures. That amalgam of Wilder's imagination and those other voices and ideas yielded, during one sleepless night, an idea for a novel he called
The Turning Point.
It could be composed in “short stories and fragments of narrations representing action from all places and ages—a sort of
Decameron,
except that the stories are of varying length
.
” It would be written in a “really new form” which could “serve as a vehicle,” he wrote in his journal, without elaborating in detail,

 

for two of my compelling preoccupations: man seen in all his history; mind seen as a force struggling out of the biologic undergrowth—to say nothing of the secondary preoccupations: woman as instigatrix; narrations as the means of depicting the scientific process; and so on.
⁴⁹

 

But the idea for the novel faded as quickly as it had materialized, and soon Wilder was back in the United States, busily looking outward at events, instead of inward at the bothersome questions that had surfaced in his journal soliloquy, now pushed aside as he began to prepare in earnest for his year at Harvard. He spent part of August playing the Stage Manager in
Our Town
at the Wellesley Summer Theatre in Massachusetts—the twelfth company with whom he had performed the role. He advised every playwright, he wrote to the Laurence Oliviers, “to get somehow somewhere
that
side of the footlights,” for there were certain lessons a playwright could learn only by putting his feet on the floor of a stage.
⁵⁰

As a citizen and a former soldier, Wilder was deeply concerned that summer about the prospect of war in Korea, writing lengthy passages in his journal about the nature of war, about wars of aggression versus wars of liberation. On July 8 he wrote that the Korean War was “about here in part due to this mixture of relief, alerted self-protection and outraged responsibility. Tragically, it is also due to the fact that in our time we are accustomed to war, and custom is almost habit and habit is almost appetite.”
⁵¹

In his journal that summer Harry Truman and Korea shared space with Goethe, Palestrina (the sixteenth-century composer whose liturgical music Wilder had studied for years), and Kierkegaard, and then with American literary figures as Wilder moved closer to the beginning of the Harvard year. By August he was almost as engrossed in analyzing Thoreau's
Walden
as he had been in analyzing the work of Lope and Joyce—and that earlier experience and those skills and tactics proved immensely useful as he built his Harvard lectures. As he embarked on detailed examinations of the work of Whitman, Poe, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Melville, what began as scholarly analysis soon transformed into a deep absorption in the sort of research that he called high adventure. Soon Wilder was making significant discoveries about the American experience, the American character, the American time sense, and the American language—the “syntax of freedom.”
⁵²

He also wrote in his journal about the loss of people he loved. Shortly before he arrived in Cambridge to begin the Norton year, he received the news of the death of Sibyl Colefax. He had spent time with Sibyl in London in March 1950, finding her thin and fragile, bent with arthritis, and often confined to bed—but still full of spirit, curiosity, hospitality. He visited her on three consecutive afternoons, and her house, as always, was full of company, including that week T. S. Eliot and Noël Coward. She died at home September 22, 1950. She was for Wilder an irreplaceable friend and an indefatigable listener, witness, encourager, and adviser. In his journal he mourned the loss:

 

It is as though with the death of Gertrude and Sibyl and the removal by distance and situation of others I have been left not only high and dry of objects [of friendship] but that the very faculty itself has cooled. I accept the condition within myself . . . with a theoretical concern, for have I not always believed emphatically that all and every derivation of Eros is the sole fount of energy?
⁵³

 

AS WILDER'S
residency at Harvard began on October 1, 1950, he settled into his quarters at Dunster House and tackled his lectures with excitement. He also agreed to teach, although he was not obligated to do so. He very soon found himself overextended, with a jammed schedule. As he explained later,

 

every time the phone rang I said “yes”—not to “social” events (I made the rule never to cross the River Charles) but to speak; and the forums and discussion groups and hospital benefit committees and Harvard Dames clubs and so on are legion.
⁵⁴

 

From the outset of his Harvard year, however, he tried to concentrate on his Norton lectures, outlining them in detailed pages in his journal. In November he worked on “The American Writer as a Speaker and to a Multitude,” a title he would change, and on Herman Melville's
Billy Budd, Foretopman,
as well as Thoreau's life and work. In December he concentrated on the nature of a work of art, especially literary forms, drawing examples from the work of Walt Whitman, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, and Benjamin Franklin.
⁵⁵
The first of the three eventually published Norton lectures explored the evolution of the American language, with special attention to Melville; the American loneliness, focusing on Thoreau; and American loneliness and individuality in a rich biographical discussion of Dickinson and her work. Whitman, Poe, and Melville were Wilder's subjects for the other lectures.
⁵⁶

He delivered the first Norton, “Adapting an Island Language to a Continental Thought,” to an audience of eight hundred in Harvard's New Lecture Hall on November 8. Next, on November 15, came “Thoreau, or the Bean-Row in the Wilderness,” followed by “Emily Dickinson, or the Articulate Inarticulate” on November 29, and “Walt Whitman and the American Loneliness” on December 6. On February 20, 1951, Wilder devoted his fifth Norton lecture to Edgar Allan Poe. His sixth and final lecture, “Melville: The Real and the Forged Ambiguities,” was given May 16. All the lectures were laced with observations about the evolution and significance of the fundamental American characteristics Wilder identified: First, the evolution of the American language—the transformation, especially by nineteenth-century American writers, of “an old island language into a new continental one.”
⁵⁷
Second, the fact that “Americans are still engaged in inventing what it is to be American.”
⁵⁸
Third, the idea that Americans “are disconnected. They are exposed to all place and all time. . . . They have a relation, but it is to everywhere, to everybody, and to always.”
⁵⁹
Next, the view that for the free, independent, and individualistic American, there is a “loneliness that accompanies independence and the uneasiness that accompanies freedom.”
⁶⁰
Finally, the observation that it is not easy to be an American, and that American writers offer various solutions to this difficulty. These key characteristics are also descriptive of Wilder's own work—his transformation of the American vernacular into a continental language; his attention to what it means to be an American; his sense of the connections of everyone to every place and every time; his awareness and his experience of the American loneliness; and his appreciation for the varieties of expression in American life and literature.

Wilder discovered a particular affinity for Emily Dickinson, writing that while she was “in all appearance the loneliest of beings,” she “solved the problem in a way which is of importance to every American: by loving the particular while living in the universal.”
⁶¹
As Wilder explored these American characteristics and their manisfestations in nineteenth-century American literature, he drew on the lives of the authors to provide context for their work, constructing insightful biographical portraits, especially of Dickinson. There are autobiographical echoes in his analyses as well, especially in his discussion of father-daughter relations in Emily Dickinson's life—dynamics that reflect the experiences of his own sisters, and of his brother and himself. Dickinson, Wilder wrote, was the daughter of “a very grim patriarch” who had, as she herself said, a “lonely life and lonelier death.”
⁶²
What daughter and father both desired was to win from each other “love, attentive love, and the sense of one's identity rebounding from some intelligent and admired being.” Knowing all too well the dynamics of his parents' marriage, Wilder observed that a patriarchal father may also have “long since quenched any spontaneous femininity in his wife. (Unquestionable authority is an offense against love, as it is against anything else, and it is ever seeking new territories to overwhelm.)”
⁶³